Companies are keen to adopt cloud technologies to aid the growth and agility of the business. However, this means that securing the perimeter is no longer just a case of monitoring on-premise systems and networks.
To detect and contain cyberattacks swiftly and protect sensitive internal operations, the risk associated with external communications also needs to be considered. Messages and file transfers to partners, suppliers and customers are all at risk of being intercepted by hackers.
The rise of cloud means hackers have a vast surface area to target that doens’t remain static. As a result, the cost of cybercrime is growing at an alarming rate, excepted to hit a new high of $10.5 trillion in damages to victim organizations in 2025.
2025 for victim organization
Here it’s important to remember that certain sectors are more at risk than others. Banks and financial institutions handle valuable and sensitive data throughout their operations, meaning they remain a constant target. For example, 78% of the 240 biggest banks in Europe were hacked last year while a major breach at an Australian financial institution saw 8 million people have their ID and passport details exposed.
Managed file transfer (MFT) systems are one of the tools gaining increasing popularity thanks to their promise of secure and efficient data-sharing solutions.
With a market set to reach $5.4 billion by 2033, let’s take a closer look at how MFTs keep data moving without increasing the risk of a breach.
In today’s digital era, data is an invaluable resource. Yet in order to be valuable, data needs to be active.
Although it’s easier to build cybersecurity defenses around static, on-premise data, this leaves the majority of business data interactions out of the equation.
MFTs address this by protecting the movement of messages, data and files inside and outside the business. They offer a more reliable and efficient means for secure data and file transfer, outpacing and outperforming applications such as file transfer protocol (FTP), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) and other methods
Oded Nahum, Global Head of Cloud Practice at Ness Digital Engineering, believes that MFTs are particularly useful for the at-risk data of the financial sector.
“Imagine a financial services company that needs to securely exchange transaction data with partner banks, update customer records across cloud-based CRM systems, and report real-time trading activity to regulatory bodies.”
“In such an environment, uninterrupted, secure, and accurate data flow is not just important, but it’s mission-critical,” Nahum continued.
The impressive growth of the MFT market sector isn’t only thanks to the ability to improve the security of data and file transfers. If MFTs are embedded into cloud infrastructures and cloud native solutions, the benefits go even further.
“The shift from on-premises MFT to cloud-native platforms solves a critical set of challenges: reducing operational burden, ensuring compliance, improving resilience, and speeding up onboarding. But cloud-native MFT also opens the door to a broader set of capabilities that address how businesses want to use data—not just move it,” he explains.
“By adding smart triggers, APIs, and cloud tools to file transfers, we can make data flow faster and more intelligently. In this new setup, when a file arrives on a server, that’s not the end—it kicks off an automated process that cleans up the data, adds useful information, and sends it exactly where it needs to go, right when it’s needed.”
This means that adopting a cloud-native MFT system acts as the foundation for more innovative data management across the organization.
Data analytic initiatives aim to help organizations unlock the intrinsic value held in their operational data and the rise of AI means they’ve never been more in demand.
Cloud-native MFT platforms can actually aid improved business performance by helping leaders derive insights and gain a critical edge.
“Cloud-native MFT is not just an endpoint solution but a strategic capability. And its full value is unlocked when treated as part of a broader data exchange strategy,” Nahum confirms.
When MFTs platforms are designed with cloud architectures in mind from day one, organizations can access an intelligent information exchange system that protects file and message transfers and allows them to be used for analytics.
Here, Nahum highlighted the game-changing benefits of leveraging AWS serverless technologies.
“We can layer in services like EventBridge to trigger workflows, Lambda to process data serverlessly, API Gateway to expose and consume data programmatically, and Glue or Redshift to transform and analyze data,” her explained.
“Together, these extend MFT from a secure file transfer system into a broader platform for automated, intelligent, and policy-driven data exchange without the burden of managing legacy infrastructure.”
A new data exchange strategy
As the adoption of digital tools and technologies increases each year, the importance of data grows too. While leaders need to protect sensitive data and information from hackers and bad actors on the one hand, they also need to ensure it can be accessed and leverages for operational purposes.
A cloud-native MFT platform enables faster decision-making, reduces integration friction, and create a more responsive, data-driven organization. What’s more, it’s an additive, intentional strategy that builds on the cloud-native foundations already in place. This means that organizations can break down silos over time to progressively move towards a business built on agile data.